Still Climbing

It was a totally cloudy day until just at sunset, when the curtain lifted just enough to let Mt. Fuji take a small bow.

I eventually did find the trail from Akiya to Koyasu, the village of small farms that takes you back a century. It starts at the end of the road that runs just across the street from the local convenience store. You climb a little bit, and then you're halfway up a hill that climbs and climbs and climbs, straight up to the top and then descends into the farm area of Koyasu. A round trip takes a few hours, but the trail is a beauty. I'm convinced it's been around since the Kamakura Period (around the 13th century), since they've found kilns from that period here, and the path has worn so deep even as it follows the ridge, that it has to have been worn down from many years of feet. Amazingly enough, there are still a very few very hidden fields at the top that are still being cultivated somehow. Most of them can be reached only by ignoring ropes and climbing over ditches (which my friend Ben and I did to every hint of a path off the main trail.) Unfortunately, I have no pictures, despite the fact that I've walked it three or four times now. It makes a perfect morning of exercise and there's the added benefit of buying some unusual vegetable or fruit from the farmers at the end of the hike.

A few days after the hike with Ben, I decided to take on another trail, this one leading off the road right behind our house. You leave the beach, go up 100 meters, take a turn and Wham. You're on a goat path that hugs the side of the hills and twists and turns through clusters of bamboo and overgrown weeds. There were a few places where the path was so narrow on the hillside I was sure I was going to slide right off. This is not an old trail like the other; no farm fields anywhere and the trail itself disappeared several times for short distances until disappearing for good just as I got over the peak. The bamboo grove was so thick with old bamboo stalks that I was just crunching my way through it until I literally tripped off the side of a wall covered in vines that was part of a larger construction.

All I had was my phone with me, so the photo quality is pretty bad, but if this isn't an Indiana Jones set, I don't know what is.

These hills look out over the sea. On the other side of the hills behind us is Yokosuka, the sea port which was a big port for the Japanese Navy. It now hosts both the Japanese and US Navies.

I'm just guessing, but it sure looks like it was once a gun emplacement and a bunker. It's built into the earth, and had several rooms, with steps leading up to the top. Very cool, very Indiana Jones-ish. And even though I walked a circuitous route around it, I still couldn't find a trail that would lead down off the other side of the mountain. So I had to walk back on the "goat path," which was even trickier going down. Next time I'll try going up from the other side and see if it leads to the same place.

 

And another shot of something from the past, though more recent. This is a cross section of the (former) middle lobe of my right lung, with the cancerous tumor in white.  And no, that's not the color of my lung. It was pink when they took it out, since I've been off cigarettes for 18 years now. But whatever they use to pickle it in turned it a dark brown. I'm hoping that's the last I'll see of this nasty little bugger, though I'd imagined a much scarier-looking caricature of a tumor.

Pickin' and Pluckin'

m got to wear her all-weather ski gear that she got for her ski trip last year.

This is the third year in a row we've picked and plucked the same ol' apple tree up in Nagano with m's grandparents, which means it is now officially an autumn ritual. (We stay at their beautiful house in Hotaka and eat big breakfasts and stare at the fire in the wood stove, since it's already a necessity here.) Unlike the last two years, though, when the weather has just been spectacular, the weather was wet and drizzly, though it did let up enough for us to do a very quick job of harvesting the apples. m's grandparents have already done the hard work over the summer, pruning the buds--they remove 9 flowers for each one they leave--so that the remainder will get the full sun and grow plump and red.

It doesn't seem like much of a tree, but it sure knows how to produce apples. It's also at a very handy height.

We got all the apples in the cars just ahead of a downpour and then made it to a ramen shop for some spicy noodles to warm us up. When we got back to the house, we had to dry all the apples to keep them from going bad, so we wiped them down and spread them out. We'd never actually counted them before so m's grandad did the laborious chore while we bet on the outcome. 447 pieces of fruit from one tree, not even counting the ones damaged by the birds and insects etc. How do you like them apples?

The next day we headed back to Tokyo, loaded down with boxes of apples. As we crossed the ridge overlooking Lake Suwa the skies started to clear.

By the time, we hit Kofu, it had turned into a beautiful day, with the snowy Southern Alps peaking out through the clouds.

I prefer the sea for long-term viewing, but these trips to Nagano are always cool. Matsumoto, which is just next door, is the first place I lived after coming to Japan, and the autumn smells--burning rice fields, the forests--really jogs the memory banks.

Shichi-go-san

M didn't feel confident about doing m's hair and kimono (it is a bit complicated) so we had it done at Morito Shrine in Hayama, just down the road.

They let me in to the room where they did m's hair and make-up (if I got bored, there was a poster with illustrations of every one of Japan's emperors on the wall) . . .

. . . but I had to leave when they began the professional job of putting on the kimono.

We took some shots at Morito Shrine before eating lunch and heading back home.

After the Shinto ceremony, they got all the kids together for a photo shoot. Hirota-san, the photographer knew enough to be incredibly quick in getting their attention and blasting away.

The girls loved being the center of attention.

It was like little Kyoto in Akiya.

And then it was time to go home. m was thrilled at the whole deal. She ate a huge meal at lunch, but the tight obi meant that it never made it to her stomach, so she was greatly relieved to take the kimono off. (Of course, after we made the rounds of the neighbors to show off.)

While I ponder the cosmic question of whether to do chemotherapy in order to add 5 percent to my five-year survival rate, I have nothing to do but to post pics from last weekend's shichi-go-san festival, celebrating kids aged three, five and seven (m will be 7 in January so she fits into the last category). There's no shopping street or commercial support for Akiya's shrine, so everyone in the village chips in to help.

The Chrysanthemum and the Chopstick

M, her glass of gold wine, and an early autumn sunset.

The farmers' food stalls are heavily stocked, as are the fish markets especially with fish like mackerel and sardines getting fattier with the colder water. A few days ago, I had a craving for octopus, so we picked a fresh one up at the local market. How fresh? Well, the tentacles were clinging onto my hand tightly enough that I had to use my other one to pull it off and drop it into the pot. I love these things but they're a pain to clean, picking out the beak and peeling the head off the guts. They are much easier to handle after they've been boiled. I cut the poor dude, who's turned from a dull gray to a blushing red, into little pieces, and dropped him into a sauce of onion, garlic, tomatoes, red wine, etc., then added the octopus juice from the boiler pot along with rice. The finished product was as close to Portuguese octopus rice as I can get it. Thank god the girls also like tako.

 Yesterday, I took the girls to Koyasu, the village I wrote about in the last post. We stopped at the farm at the very top and bought chrysanthemum blossoms and a kind of potato I've never seen before, the size of small creek stones. The woman who runs the farm (the farmess?) explained how to cook the blossoms, and we ended up standing around in the late afternoon sun, chatting and nibbling on various things for a while. She even had her son run and fetch the tree pruner so she could cut down some jujube fruit, called natsume in Japanese, that we could taste. Unfortunately, bugs had already beat us to them, so we'll have to wait until next year.

Back home, M boiled the chrysanthemums. We had them with a slight vinegar/shoyu marinade along with the creek-stone potatoes that M had cooked in the rice.

One step at a time

Koyasu no sato is a village--actually a scattering of very small farms among the hills behind us. I haven't done much exploring before today, but I stumbled upon this raised path through a marsh of wildflowers.

It's been two weeks since the operation, and though it hurts a bit at night when it's hard to find the right position, I feel pretty good. Good enough, in fact, to put my patched up lungs through some paces. The last week has been a weird one weather-wise: we had a typhoon that went right by, but unlike past typhoons the winds were from the north and the hills blocked them off. So we had a very calm sea instead, though with pouring rain and cold. We spent the weekend with the wood stove going all day for the first time this year. Then yesterday morning brought us a rainbow.

And today is a cloudless beauty. Fuji is snow-capped for the first time this year, and it is very warm though windy. m's class at school was going on a hike up Mt. Ogusu (the very large hill just behind us, which is the highest point on the Miura Peninsula, and thinking of that stimulated me to go on a short hike of my own.

They call Koyasu no Sato a village, but it's more a scattering of very small farms among the hills. For years, it was only accessible by a winding one-lane road until a huge housing development went up nearby, and tunnels were built, trees were downed, and convenience stores popped up. Amazingly enough, I found today, a lot of the farms have survived and have pretty much maintained their isolation, since you  have to get off the main road and take some of the twisting narrow turns before you get to them--and it seems that most people just zip by (including me, until today).

It was really like stepping back in time. The valleys are completely overgrown, and the small farms are mostly hidden away. I could almost believe they were Tennessee moonshiners hiding from the law. And when I say "small farms," I mean small. Some of the plots were three meters wide and five meters long, which is closer to a garden, but there would be a whole string of plots of this size, with autumn eggplants still to be harvested, while the winter crop of turnips, broccoli and other vegetables were just beginning to appear. They're all maintained by hand, and I have no idea how they make a living. There were a few unmanned vegetable stands where people are expected to take what they want and leave their money. (I could put together a pretty good map of 20 or so of these nearby that we regularly frequent. Only one claims to have a peeping camera.) But these stalls of Koyasu, I am sure, have never, ever been visited by a drive-by customer; only someone who knew where he was going would make it by here.

While I was climbing the last bit of road past the last farm, a car pulled up and parked, and presuming that he knew where he was, I asked him if he knew the mountain path to Akiya, which I've heard of but never been able to find from the Akiya side. He didn't know. He was a Tokyoite who was renting one of the plots to grow stuff ("Difficult," he said, "for a beginner.") and he passed me on to the old farmer lady who was bringing him straw mulch for his field. I walked with her back to her own vegetable stall, where she explained the route, but insisted that no one has walked it in years, so it was too overgrown to get through. Of course, I was much too stubborn to believe her and ended in the forest 20 minutes later with no discernible path in any direction.

Reluctantly, I stumbled back out of there, and found another route home. It was funky in some part, with the little creek bordered by a fence so massive it could keep wild boars at bay, and steel bridges that went nowhere. But it later turned into the very nicely done walkway through a marsh that led back down to the main road and the cars zipping by.  It had started out as a short hike, but ended up as a three-hour hike to another century and back to the beach. I'm thinking of going back tomorrow, even though I'm feeling a little sore.

I'm Back

Here's the pre-op cancerous me (left), and the cancer-less me with improved heart function and the girls. Contrary to the artist's rendering, I did not pee in my pants prior to the operation.

I'm back home. I would have been out even earlier if the complications from my previous bouts in my twenties with pneumothorax hadn't popped up, but I'm glad the docs had the wherewithal to clean that up as well. A weak lung wall was leaking and that made them put in a second drain and leave it there until my lungs were back up to full speed. At one time I had seven different tubes and drains attached to various parts of my anatomy, and the removal of each one was responsible for a celebration. I'm now the proud owner of a nice five-inch gash under my right armpit, accompanied by two smaller scars underneath where they stuck in the camera and had the drains. I also have a week's worth of pain killer and sleeping pills, but the dreams have been so vivid and incredibly stupid that I figured my imagination doesn't need the extra fuel. Now I'm focusing on taking long walks and getting various massages from M until I get my strength back. (Did I mention she gave me this incredible head massage while we were waiting for the nurses to come wheel me to the OR? I was so relaxed by the time they showedup, they had to pour me onto the operating table.)

On November 5th  I meet again with the doctors and get x-rayed to see how well I'm doing. And then I'm going to have to make some decisions about whether to keep to this lifestyle of the long commute, or turn into a local hippie, surfer, or one of the other groups of people around here that seem to live without a visible source of income.

Anyway, again thanks for everything. m and I decided that since my lungs now take up less space my heart has room to get bigger so my love for her, M and all my family and friends can continue to grow.

Thank you very, very much

I'll write more personally when I have access to my own computer (this is from the hospital's Internet Corner), but thanks to everyone for all the thoughts, prayers and concern for my condition. I've never realized how important those can be, but it was a huge, comforting feeling of support. Thank you.

A deep, deep breath

Almost one week to the hour from when I went under, under the glare of the overhead lights, I've had the last of various tubes (which numbered 7 at the peak) removed and feel incredibly free. The last one was the second of two drains from my right lung, and it seems like I've been dragging it around and pushing it out of the way and sleeping with it, and sharing meals with it for ages. I was getting close to giving it a name. But I won't miss it for a minute. Its removal heralds the opening of the hospital exit doors tomorrow and I'll be on my way home to finish the recuperation there.

I can't deny the last few days have been driving me crazy. I felt pretty good other than when the drain tube would poke the inside of my lung everytime I took a deep breath. I'd asked one of the nurses, "Can I walk around?" and when she said yes, I waited until no one was around, put on my clothes (the drain bag was still banging my thigh, but wtf) and skipped out. Made it down the street to our old house in Hiroo, just to look around, and wandered around the neighborhood until I got tired. I thought I was home free until the evening when the nurse who was attaching the drip asked me. "Did you go outside today?" "Just around the outside of the hospital," I said. "That's odd," she said. "We got a call from someone who told us some foreigner was wandering around Hiroo. And he had a drain bag hanging out of his jacket."

 "Well, we all look pretty much the same," I said.

I was lightly chewed out by pretty much every one of the staff, but they were all smiling.

A Breather

Anyone here for sunset and fish stories is in the wrong place, at least for a week or so--though it is a beautiful afternoon, after a day spent swimming all the way beyond the pier and back in the still warm and totally calm sea, spreading chicken shit and building some raised beds for the vegetable garden, and watching some egrets, seagulls and a crow or two fighting over a dead fish on the beach.

Spent most of the day yesterday going over the final operation protocol with the surgeon, getting an ultra sound check-up of my heart to see if it could handle it, and getting the run-down with the anesthetician. There were a lot of diagrams drawn, papers gone over, and everything is very fascinating in a scientific way (You can do that!? Damn!) until, of course, it reaches the last few paragraphs: "Oh yes, this says there's a possibility--a very slight one, of course--that you could die from complications. Could you sign here, please?"

So it's cool and scary at the same time--like a good horror story. It's going to be one of the least intrusive surgeries they can do, making one incision for the cutting and another small incision for the endoscopy camera which they'll watch on a tv monitor (I'd love to get a copy of the DVD) as they cut. The anesthetician was a character, though a horrible sketch artist. I've been going over his drawings, and I'm either going to have two tubes put down my throat to carry oxygen and anesthetic to my lungs, after which the one to my right lung will be turned off during the operation . . . or I'm supposed to make a right somewhere after the road splits just before the convenience store.

Oh yes. The surgeon told me that during their team meeting to discuss the operation, one of the nurses mentioned that she'd been on the team that did my hernia operation at the same hospital five years ago. "So," he said, and spread his hands wide. It was like someone inviting you to a party with the reassurance that you'll know at least one of the people there.

The weird thing is that it did kind of work.

中止 Cancelled

It's more than wet. It poured all yesterday, got very heavy last night, and rain has kept falling without a letup all day today. Unfortunate, because today was supposed to be the big undokai athletic meet. Teams from the four villages that run along the coast here--Sajima, Ashina, Akiya, and Kuruwa--were supposed to compete at various events that make up the usual undokai. Races--sprints, relays--and other events.  I don't know about the other villages, but we in Akiya even had t-shirts prepared for the big day, with logos, one in Japanese on the front, and one in English on the back. But the downpour soaked the school grounds, and so we'll have to wait until next year to see if M is very good at throwing small balls into an elevated basket and m very good at eating bread hanging on a string, and running in the relay. (I was supposed to run the three-legged race with m but we couldn't agree to do it.)

The front logo

And the one on the back

Homework

 

I'm taking today off. I can't pretend that it's not exhausting, making the long commute, being in the office and concentrating on various things with the big event--the upcoming operation--hanging over my head. I don't know how other people handle it, but I'm finding it hard to go more than two or three days without a break. So, instead of rushing out in the morning while everyone else is just finishing breakfast, I got to hang around, and watch M get m's free-spirited curly hair under control, and send her off to school.

 

Watching her upload that fairly heavy schoolbag with all its attachments on her skinny frame had me in stitches. She's off to pick up her friend at her house, and then they continue picking up other friends until they have a whole posse of kids making the 1k trek to the school. There aren't a lot of sidewalks in this area, but most of it is down backstreets, and the pack of kids definitely is more visible than if she were alone. 

I think I'll spend the day just staying healthy, maybe take a long walk down the coast. I don't know how long the recuperation will take before I can do yard work, and we figured it would be best to get the heavy stuff done now. So last weekend, I shoveled a ton of dirt we'd ordered from the pile where they dumped it in the yard (below) to the vegetable garden area to start preparing for next spring (though we might try to do a few winter vegetables, like broccoli or something).

Bright spots

 The end of the summer put on some spectacular sunset displays. I didn't get home in time to see a lot of them, but the ones I did see--on weekends and holidays--were amazing. These are all shot from our front window. The one above is shot with a friend's 200mm lens, since I don't have one.

 

This one (above) is on one of the two days they call--as I've mentioned before--"Diamond Fuji" days, when--on its way across the horizon--the sun sets just behind the crown of the mountain.  If you look straight out our window facing the sea this angle is at about 45 degrees to the right. In mid winter the sun sets straight out the window; mid summer probably 60 degrees to the right.

  

This last one is an example of a tumor seen on a  PET CT scan, almost exactly the way my tumor looked when they first showed it to me. The bright spot is where the radioactive tracer has collected at the tumor. I met with the surgeon yesterday, and we've decided to have the surgery on October 18th. The MRI of my head and the CT of my insides have shown that there isn't any spread, so I'm very thankful for that. They're going to have to take out the middle lobe of my right lung, but the lung capacity tests were good, and the doc said I may lose as little as 10 percent of my capacity. I don't have much time to make a difference, I guess, but I'm going to start trying to up my breathing capacity before the operation. 

Roma Therapy

The temperature dropped 10 degrees (C) between yesterday and today, so it just could be that summer's over. The hottest summer since the weather bureau was established, says the weather bureau. We were able to make it through, however, without using any air conditioning--except for the one day that we got back from Colorado (the switch in humidity was impossible to handle). M said the days got hot, and the blinds came down to hide the sun and the view. But the evening and night breezes coming off the sea were just enough to sleep comfortably, so it was amazingly suffer-free. Not so some of the garden, and the vegetation in the hills around us has also had a hard time and is less green than usual. We did do well with cucumbers, goya, peppers and shishito; not so well with zucchini and eggplant.We did very well with tomatoes, a blessing since we do love our tomato sauce. For a while there, we'd get one of these harvests (above) every day or so, and we were able to freeze a lot. More than anything, our first-year garden taught us a lot about what not to do and that should go into lessons for next year. (Failing at zucchini, according to some, is like not being able to tie your shoelaces.) But damn, these Roma tomatoes are good!

M's slowly increasing her aromatherapy massage clients. So far, once they come to the salon at the house, they seem to want to come back, so that's a good sign, isn't it? She also goes out on call to various places, hotels, spas, etc.  I'm sure she thinks it's slow going, but I'm surprised at how quickly she's established herself. It's been a lot of hard work, but the results are good. As I'm writing, she has a client in the salon now.

Ever since seeing those glowing isotopes floating in my right lung on the image of the doctor's computer, I'm very conscious of what's going on inside me, though there's little I can do about it at the moment. Cut the alcohol intake. Walk more. Get in shape. Sleep well. Learn patience. Eat tomatoes.
I'm not sure about the last one, but it's the easiest one to do.

This really sucks

Last Friday I was told I've got lung cancer. On Saturday, I got nailed by a jellyfish. Both things really sucked, but the weekend got much better after that. We even managed to see the emperor and empress do their peculiar stiff wave from their motorcade a few meters away.

First things first. Everybody told me that jellyfish season was over. It is September, after all, so I put away the anti-jellyfish cream and put on my swim suit, stepped thigh deep into the ocean and dove forward . . . right into strands of jellyfish strings. Luckily, though, it was just those thin detached strings that hit my face arms and legs. (I guess the jellyfish are hanging out a bit longer with the warm water of this very hot year.) That ended my swim, as I had to go pour on some vinegar to try to control the rash. It still itches a bit, but it's manageable and disappearing fast.

Which is how I hope the lung cancer turns out. It hasn't been fun waiting for the final diagnosis. They told me the day of my annual check in August up that there was a spot on my right lung--both in the x-ray and the CT scan, but then I had to go back a week later to get a broncoscopy--which was inconclusive--and then wait another week to get a PET CT scan and then another week for the final conclusion. It was almost a relief to get to this point, since I was unable to control my imagination from envisioning everything under the sun.

Right now, it's stage 1, about 3 centimeters in diameter. I'm undergoing more tests to see if it has spread. Had a CT scan of my innards, and it looks like those are clean. Will have an MRI on my head next week to see if there's any movement up there before meeting the surgeon and planning the next step.

embarrassing photos

Y-chan took a lot of photos at last week's festival that made mine look pretty lame by comparison, so I'm going to swallow my pride, along with the last bits of the marinaded octopus that Y bought and that we have feasted upon since, and show some of them. That's the mikoshi girl (above) all dressed and ready for bear(ing) the portable shrine around the village.

That's her doing her job, just before she started shouting at the kid next to her to quit goofing around and help carry the mikoshi.

And m again, this time lugging the shrine through the surf (though it looks as if the adult is doing most of the work). I'll forgive the kids here since a lot of them were just barely holding their heads out of the waves.

And finally Y's shot of the adult shrine in the water. At this point, as I mentioned, these guys are completely out of it, but that doesn't stop them from rocking the heavy shrine up and down in the water so frantically that they're always just a hair from losing it . . . but they never do.

akiya matsuri

So why am I showing you this photo of a little truck full of drummers with an accompanying flute player, or should I say flautist, and a fine array of tissue paper flowers? Bear with me a moment. It was a busy day.

It started out with M's mom, and Y,  K, and Y2,  M's friends, who stayed the night in order to make the trip to the Nagai fishing port's morning market, which--if you remember a previous post--takes place on the 2nd Saturday of each month. M had to take little m to the start of the local festival (in which m was going to get her start at carrying the mikoshi, the portable shrine around the neighborhood). So I drove M's mom, and Y and K down the coast to the port only to find that the incredibly nasty wind and rain of the night before (which had almost aborted my bike ride from the station to the house) had stopped the fishing boats from doing any damage to the society of fishes. In other words, the market was shuttered, and we had to make do with the regular fresh fish store--where we ended up buying 7 sardines, 4 kamasu, 8 sea urchins, 12 big hamaguri clams, 6 scallops, 1 steamed octopus and 7 lunch packs of octopus rice, plus cucumbers, etc., blah, blah, blah, at a price slightly higher than we would have paid at the market.

Got home, ate the octopus rice and tracked down the progress of m's portable shrine. This year was a big one for Akiya: there were, I think, 5 of them--one for little kids, one for little bigger kids, one for teenage girls, one for teenage boys, and one for the adults. (Take my word for it. The teenage girls kicked ass. Made the teenage boys look like total wimps, and the adults look like they were playing catch up all day.) 

 

We caught up with m's shrine when they were taking a break. (The kids carry the mikoshi from 10 to 3 or 4 in the afternoon, so there are plenty of breaks for food and drink. I'm not sure the kids need it but the adults use all the break time to catch up on their lack of alcohol and conversation over the past year.) 

m was very proud that she was already hurting from hoisting the shrine palanquin on her shoulders.

See, she's already got the mix of arrogance, self-importance and cool that is so important for young women at festivals. (She doesn't quite have the callus yet, though, that shrine carrying fanatics get from hoisting the beams on their shoulders. I knew one guy who used to travel all over the country to the big festivals and whose permanent callus rose an inch or two out of his shoulder. I almost expected the growth to grow a head, and start talking, like the character in the movie How to Get Ahead in Advertising.)

But she quickly had to get back to her palanquin hoisting.

Which brings us back to the  photo at the beginning of this post. That little truck with the drummers and the flowers? Well, I helped make those flowers. 

Not really make them, to be honest. But two weeks ago, m and M went to the local fish union building--or to be more specific, house--and folded colored tissues and tied them to the colored rods. And last week, I and m went back to the union where we sat around on the tatami floor with other families and unfolded the tissues into those flowers, while listening to music from the quintessential Shonan beach band, the Southern All Stars. 

So I did my part, I guess, which made me feel less guilty about leaving M and m with the mikoshi, and going back to the house, where I stoked the barbecue and M's mom, Y, Y2 and K and I cooked the sardines, clams, etc. and emptied wine bottles for several hours until the shrine parade made its way around to our part of the village--in fact right down the beach in front of our house.

As always they end up taking the mikoshi into the sea . . .

 . . . before getting totally knackered and finishing up by carrying it back to the shrine. I've done this twice in my life when I much younger and it was the closest thing to doing drugs that I've ever experienced. The chanting, the physical strain and the repetition (not to mention the alcohol every 200 meters) just takes you to a different place. You can see it in the eyes of these guys. They have no idea where they are.

m caught on very quick, and we heard her chastising some of the boys who were goofing off to "quit playing around and do your part!" In a few years from now, I believe, she's going to be leading the teenage girl group in continuing to kick the ass of the other groups. She's got it in her eyes.